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As already intimated by BBB, and relating to what I said earlier, your 0870 supplier is ripping *you* off. This indirectly fleeces the end user - YOUR CUSTOMERS and YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. It is not that difficult to understand this.

How much do you receive, per minute during the daytime, from your 0870 number? How much do you think your supplier is receiving? It's not difficult to work out.

Just who is the charity here?

Your ogranization is being ripped off. Switch to geographic and you won't be reliant upon a telco supplier using clandestine methods to deceive the public (national rate garbage).

Your use of 0870 DOES say a lot about your organization, just as Sky, DVLA, A+L and the thousands of other organizations that do not give a toss about the end user. Your charity is a small user of such numbers, and it could be argued that it really doesn't matter, however these numbers are so pervasive that the sellers of such numbers have even invaded respectable charities, for example RSPCA.

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I think you are still missing the point about what happens to the money callers pay to contact you.

If you only getting 1.5p per minute and have to pay £10 per month - that's a very bad deal by the way, most are free - what is happening to the rest (a minimum of 6.01p per minute?

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Good point, but the scam goes deeper than this. Westier seems to imply that I don't give a stuff about his charity. Wrong. Exactly because I DO care about these matters is why I have tried to point out that his charity is being taken for a ride.

My wife is involved with animal rescue, although not with Westies or other dogs, however for illustrative purposes, let us assume she is president of the Miami Westie Rescue Center. Now let us assume that she wishes to contact Mr Johnson and his organization that she has seen through a trade magazine or whatever, and the number she sees is 0870 blah blah. Now, my wife is an American citizen. She has no idea about the bizarre implementation of numbering systems in the United Kingdom. She neither knows, nor cares, about termination payments, originating operators, terminating operators, uplifts, routing, BT mechanisms for calculating payments, Ofcom, ICSTIS and the myriad of problems related to non-geographic numbers, nor should she need to know about this garbage.

So, she has a business proposition, or some other idea she needs to run by westirehoming which, let's say, could give the charity's income a boost. She picks up her calling card, and being familiar with dialling the UK, calls 011 44 870 609 2825 and gets either a NU tone, or some other message saying that the call cannot be completed as dialled -please check the number and dial again. She has no idea that 011 44 870 is some form of pseudo-premium rate number that some operators do not connect, therefore she gives up.

This is a hypothetical example, however it could happen, much like someone who is ill, and tries to call his/her surgery from say Bolivia and finds that the Bolivian telephone company hasn't got a clue about 0844 numbers so loved by NEG and similar scammers.

As I have said before, the UK is entering the dark ages for telephony and Ofcom is mainly to blame.

Even more worrying is that Mr Johnson is *PAYING* for his 0870 number, and most of the revenue is going to the provider and not his charity. He fails to understand this point, therefore there is little point in expecting change.